ABSTRACT
Children’s language development, especially in first language (L1)
acquisition, is beneficial to investigate and observe for it is useful to
develop second language learning which children’s L1 also affects the other
language level-vocabulary and grammar. One of children’s language developments
is how they use deixis. Deixis means 'pointing to' something. In verbal
communication however, deixis in its narrow sense refers to the contextual
meaning of pronouns, and in its broad sense, what the speaker means by a
particular utterance in a given speech context. It is words or phrases that can
only be understood from the context of the text or utterance where they are
found. Children are often hard to negotiate meaning, and they try hard to find
it through some deixis. When they notice a strange object, they will soon ask
‘what is that?’ It means that they use a deictic expression (that) to indicate
something in the immediate context. This descriptive research, therefore,
revealed how the child uses deixis and what kind of deixis he uses. The data
was obtained from observation in daily life of a little child aged two years.
It was recorded and analyzed into deixis category. The results of the study show
that the child prefers to employ the deixis, in particular spatial deixis at
all, to acquire his first language.
Keywords
Deixis, First Language Acquisition
